More year-end books

Salon has just posted their eleven item list of the year's ten best books. (Everyone really seems to like Kafka on the Shore. Maybe I'll have to give it another chance when it comes out in paperback.)

Interestingly, the New York Times' Public Editor has just written an examination of how that newspaper's Book Review decides who gets reviewed and by whom. On the whole, it's rather dry reading, but I found interesting that the editors attempt to maintain objectivity by keeping watch over their mealtime company. Byron Calame writes that "Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the Book Review, [says that] he and his top editors 'do very few lunches with publishers or agents' where they could be lobbied about decisions."

While I'm at it, here are some other publications' lists of the best fiction of 2005.

• Amazon.com
  
• The Boston Globe
  
• The Chicago Tribune
  
• The Christian Science Monitor
  
• The London Sunday Times
  
• The UK Telegraph
  
• The Washington Post
  

And Publisher's Weekly's list, which is not so much a best-of, but sort of an inventory, and is perhaps the most entertaining of the bunch.